It’s
incredible that voters consider Donald Trump more honest than his
opponent. But it’s sadly in line with society’s double standards

Blues
legend BB King once sang: “Never trust a woman, until she’s dead and
buried.” Sadly, it’s a sentiment that sounds just at home in our current
political discourse as it does an old song: while this week’s NBC/WSJ poll
shows Hillary Clinton leading Donald Trump in general support, voters
consider Trump more “honest and straightforward” than Clinton by 10
points.

Let’s take a moment to consider this. A candidate whose first campaign ad was judged by one site to contain one lie every four seconds and who, according to Huffington Post, told over 70 lies in just one televised town hall; a man who one philosopher argues has “perfected the outrageous untruth as a campaign tool”, is considered more honest than his opponent.

This isn’t a new problem for Clinton – a CNN poll from July
found that only 30% of people surveyed found Clinton trustworthy, while
43% thought Trump was. It’s also not a new issue for American women.

The
notion that women are fundamentally untrustworthy snakes through almost
every area of our lives. Managers distrust women who ask for flextime; women who show anger are less trusted than their male counterparts; and people think the more makeup a woman wears,
the less trustworthy she is. (In fact, there is a trove of “don’t trust
women” memes inspired by before-and-after pictures of women with
makeup.)

Republican policies and conservative thought, too, rely
on this belief. Legislators have tried to pass laws that would mandate
women get written permission from men before obtaining abortions, or
have suggested that rape and incest exceptions would give way to women
lying about abuse. There is a reason that one of the phrases most often
used by the pro-choice community is “trust women”.

When it comes
to sexual assault or domestic violence, victims – the vast majority of
whom are women – are still widely disbelieved. When Amber Heard brought
charges against her then-husband Johnny Depp, she was accused of
fabricating the allegations to extort him in their divorce settlement.
Only when a video of Depp appearing to behave aggressively was released
and Heard donated millions from the settlement to a charity did the
scrutiny slow. There are literally dozens of women who have accused Bill
Cosby of rape, and still there are people who believe every single one
of them is making it up, something I find barely credible. The way that
the police doubt sexual assault victims has even been shown to be part
of the reason we have such a backlog of untested rape kits: officers
treat women shoddily and they don’t want to come back to pursue charges.When we don’t trust women, when we disbelieve them even in the face of thoroughly convincing evidence, everyone suffers.

It was the Friday before Labor Day, and Alicia Keys,
the 35-year-old pop star, was on the “Today” show performing for the
program’s summer concert series — she’s about to release a new album,
and she wrote the theme song for “Queen of Katwe,” out next week. There was a lot to talk about. But instead, Ms. Keys spent most of her time talking about makeup
(and not wearing it) with the anchors Tamron Hall, Billy Bush and Al
Roker, who were doggedly wiping the pancake off their faces.

“It” is #nomakeup — a meme, a movement, a cri de coeur — that has been roiling social media for months. If you missed the kerfuffle, it started in May, when Ms. Keys wrote an essay
for Lenny, Lena Dunham’s online magazine, about the insecurities she
felt being a woman in the public eye, and the roles (and makeup) she put
on over the years to armor herself. She wrote about the anxiety she
endured if she left her house unadorned: “What if someone wanted a
picture? What if someone posted it?” And then, when she went without
makeup or styling for an album portrait, she felt liberated, and the act
became a metaphor. “I hope to God it’s a revolution,” she wrote.

That’s a nice story, right? Inspiring and kind of sweet? Feh. “Makeup-gate 2016,” as The New York Post
and others called it, has grown only weirder and louder, as Twitter was
at first ignited with Alicia Keys supporters, and then flooded with a
backlash against her. And then with the backlash to the backlash.
#Nomakeup was empowering and brave. No, it was annoying, incendiary and
invasive. Ms. Keys’s (mostly female) detractors howled at her
disingenuousness (surely she had spent thousands on skin care?) and her
deceit (surely she was wearing tinted moisturizer?); some slammed her
for not looking pretty enough (though they used coarser words than
those).

Late last month, Swizz Beatz, Ms. Keys’s husband, took to Instagram with a video defending
his wife: “This is deep,” he said, clearly incredulous. “Somebody’s
sitting home mad, because somebody didn’t wear makeup on their face?”

Don’t be surprised that this is news, said Letty Cottin Pogrebin,
the second-wave feminist activist and author. “It’s all so familiar,”
she said. “Alicia Keys could be taking a page from the no-makeup
orthodoxy of the women’s movement 40 years ago. I’d never heard of her
before this brouhaha, but now I’ll follow her anywhere. What she’s doing
is pop-consciousness-raising. She’s not just talking about the tyranny
of makeup. She’s talking about female authenticity. She’s challenging
the culture’s relentless standards of feminine conformity and the beauty
industry’s incessant product hype.”

(Ms. Pogrebin said that while she was reading Ms. Keys’s essay, an ad popped up for some kind of skin cream.)

Why
is it, wondered Linda Wells, founding editor of Allure magazine, that
fashion is considered self-expression and makeup is self-absorption? Or
something more pernicious? Ms. Wells recalled “The Beauty Myth,”
Naomi Wolf’s 1991 book in which she argued that contemporary ideals of
beauty, proposed in large part by a male-dominated cosmetics industry,
were enslaving women and holding them in thrall to all manner of
restrictive practices, from makeup to surgery to eating disorders. “I
get the argument, but I don’t agree with it,” Ms. Wells said. “To me,
we’re not all passive victims. Make your choice, like Alicia Keys.
Decide what makes you feel confident and enjoy it.”

Several years ago Aurora DeMarco,
53, was having health problems. The divorced masseuse and hospice care
provider was stressed, depressed, and overwhelmed by all the upkeep
of her three-bedroom condo in the tony Brooklyn neighborhood of Park
Slope, known for its majestic brownstones and trendy boutiques. And she
hated that simply meeting a friend in one of the nearby artisanal coffee
shops had become “astronomically expensive.”

“Life was a grind,” says DeMarco. “It was a lot of money, time, and effort to maintain that lifestyle.”So two years ago, DeMarco left it all behind.

In
the glorious ’60s, we might have said that she turned on, tuned in, and
dropped out. Or maybe we’d just cut to the chase and say that she
joined a commune. In fact, DeMarco did the modern-day equivalent: She
joined “an intentional community,” a group-living arrangement that in
some ways harks back to the heyday of hippies. It’s becoming an
increasingly popular lifestyle choice for more mainstream residents as
rents, home prices, and the cost of living just keep rising.

She
now pays $810 a month for her own room in a 10-bedroom house in New York
City’s Staten Island as part of the Ganas community. The 75-member
group is spread out over eight buildings in the neighborhood. And the
best part for DeMarco, who still works outside the community, is
everyone shares in the burden of cooking and other daily chores.

“I feel like I have a support network,” DeMarco says. “I’m not so much on the hamster wheel.”DeMarco
is one of a growing number of individuals in recent years who have
sought out intentional communities, where people with the same ideals
live and work together to achieve them. Some indeed fit the classic
’60s definition of communes—where members have jobs in their communities
and share finances, lifestyles, everything. Others are modern
varieties of co-housing communities, such as eco-villages where
participants strive to be more environmentally friendly.

In latest incident, Kentucky's governor said a Clinton presidency may necessitate bloodshed

Over
the past several days, pundits and voters alike have been up in arms
over "careless" comments made by the Democratic and Republican
campaigns. Republicans have whipped themselves into a frenzy over
Hillary Clinton daring to characterize half of Donald Trump's supporters
as a "basket of deplorables," despite the fact that data supports her claim of Trump's voters being racist xenophobes. (If anything, she underestimated the number.) On the other side of the aisle, Democrats have been hammering Trump's VP pick, Mike Pence, for refusing to fully denounce
former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. Yet, despite Pence's
political cowardice and Clinton's jarring honesty, the most troubling
comment of late wasn't made by any of the nominees. It was uttered by
Republican Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, who, in a speech at the Values Voter Summit Saturday, said conservatives might have to resort to bloodshed for the nation to "recover" from a Clinton presidency.

"I
want us to be able to fight ideologically, mentally, spiritually,
economically, so that we don't have to do it physically. But that may,
in fact, be the case," he said."I do think it would be
possible [for the nation to recover], but at what price?" he went on.
"The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood of who?
The tyrants, to be sure, but who else? The patriots. Whose blood will
be shed? It may be that of those in this room. It might be that of our
children and grandchildren."

Bevin's comments amounted to the
dangerous rantings of a treasonous political figure. To see them any
other way is to willfully ignore America's history of white, Christian,
right-wing violence.The governor wasn't talking to soccer moms
when he talked about shedding blood over a Clinton presidency. He was
playing dog-whistle politics at a time when our nation's citizenry
includes a growing number of resentful, irrational, heavily armed
pseudo-patriots – a basket of deplorables, you might say.

Despite
how white conservatives profess to love "law and order," history shows
that to be selectively enforced rhetoric. America was established with
rifles and gun powder, and then those same tools were used to maintain
status-quo subjugation over minority groups for centuries. This violence
is how America "negotiated" with Native peoples and created a massive,
unpaid, brutalized workforce. It's how America freed itself from British
colonial rule, only to ensure said freedom wasn't granted to black
folks. It's how America responded to black sharecroppers who attempted to unionize, economically self-sufficient and thriving black communities, black children who tried to integrate into schools, black students who sat at lunch counters with their white neighbors, and black people who simply wanted the right to vote.

Wednesday, September 14, 2016

Why Islam resists secularization, and how that continues to shape the politics of the Middle East.

By Isaac ChotinerAug. 16 2016One
of the hopes that grew out of the Arab Spring was that a relatively
moderate strain of Islamist politics could thrive in the region. Given
the widespread prevalence of dictators and military-led regimes, and the
violent radicals who oppose them in mirrored gruesomeness, groups like
Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood were seen as potential alternatives. Five
years later, however, the Arab Spring has devolved into a collection of
bloody failures everywhere from Egypt to Syria. Another proposed model
of Islamism—Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey—was already giving way to
autocracy well before a quashed coup attempt further entrenched
Erdogan’s demagoguery.

These failures have raised the fraught
question of whether Islam itself is partially to blame. Shadi Hamid, a
senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is the author of a new book,
Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle Over Islam Is Reshaping the World.
The title gives some hint of his provocative analysis. As he writes,
“If Islam is, in fact, distinctive in how it relates to politics, then
the foundational divides that have torn the Middle East apart will
persist, and for a long time to come.”

I recently spoke by phone
with Hamid. During the course of our conversation, which has been edited
and condensed for clarity, we discussed why liberals have trouble
taking religion seriously, the future of Islamist politics in Turkey and
Egypt, and what the rise of Donald Trump has meant for American
Muslims.

Shadi Hamid:
I’m essentially arguing that Islam is fundamentally different from
other religions in a very specific way: its relationship to law and
politics and governance. I wanted to use “exceptionalism” because I
felt, at least for me, that it was value-neutral: It can be either good
or bad depending on the context. I also wanted to challenge the
assumption—very common in the bastions of Northeastern liberal
elitism—that religion playing a role in public life is always or
necessarily a bad thing. That’s the idea of the title, and what that
means in practice is that Islam has proven to be resistant to
secularism, and I would argue will continue to be resistant to
secularism and secularization really for the rest of our lives.

What do you think it is about Islam that makes it resistant to secularism in a way that, say, Christianity and Judaism are not?

I
think you have to go back to the founding moment 14 centuries ago.
Jesus was a dissident against a reigning state, so he was never in a
position to govern. Naturally, the New Testament is not going to have
much to say about public law. Prophet Muhammad wasn’t just a prophet. He
was also a politician, and not just a politician, but a head of state
and a state-builder. If Prophet Muhammad was in a position of holding
territory and governing territory, then presumably the Quran would have
to have something to say about governance. Otherwise, how would Prophet
Muhammad be guided? That’s one thing intertwining the religion and
politics that isn’t accidental, and was meant to be that way.

The
Earth’s ability to absorb greenhouse gases without violently disrupting
the climate is finite, and each additional person contributes to the
total amount

Earlier
this summer, I found myself in the middle of a lively debate because of
my work on climate change and the ethics of having children.

NPR correspondent Jennifer Ludden profiled some of my work in procreative ethics with an article entitled, “Should we be having kids in the age of climate change?,” which summarized my published views that we ought to consider adopting a “small family ethic” and even pursuing fertility reduction efforts
in response to the threat from climate change. Although
environmentalists for decades have worried about overpopulation for many
good reasons, I suggest the fast-upcoming thresholds in climate change
provide uniquely powerful reasons to consider taking real action to slow
population growth.

Clearly, this idea struck a nerve: I was
overwhelmed by the response in my personal email inbox as well as op-eds
in other media outlets and over 70,000 shares on Facebook. I am
gratified that so many people took the time to read and reflect on the
piece.

Having read and digested that discussion, I want to
continue it by responding to some of the most vocal criticisms of my own
work, which includes research on “population engineering” – the
intentional manipulation of human population size and structure – I’ve
done with my colleagues, Jake Earl and Colin Hickey.

In short, the
varied arguments against my views – that I’m overreacting, that the
economy will tank and others – haven’t changed my conviction that we
need to discuss the ethics of having children in this era of climate
change.

Some comments – those claiming climate change is a hoax,
devised by those who wish to control the world’s resources – are not
worth responding to. Since 97% of all relevant experts cannot convince
climate change skeptics of the basic scientific facts, then nothing I
say will change their minds.Other concerns, however, do require a
response. Many people reacted to my work on procreation ethics by
saying climate change will not be so bad, and so curbing individual
desires, such as having children, in its name is unnecessary
fear-mongering.

In my work, I suggest that 1.5-2
degrees Celsius warming over preindustrial levels will be “dangerous”
and “very bad”, while 4 degrees C will be “catastrophic” and will leave
large segments of the Earth “largely uninhabitable by humans”. Here is a
very brief survey of the evidence for those claims based on what I
consider reputable sources.

For
my documentary, Equal Means Equal, I spoke to women across the US to
argue that full equality under the law must be enshrined in the
constitution

These words were uttered to me in 2009 by an actor in full early 20th century suffrage costume at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC.

I
was stunned. Americans didn’t have sex equality in their constitution?
How did I miss that? I was educated, graduated Yale – in fact, I was at
the Smithsonian to screen my film about the first US congresswoman
Jeannette Rankin (A Single Woman).

Could
it really be true, I wondered? I decided to take a closer look at the
status of women in the United States and the myriad of issues that
affected them. With the help of my mother and husband, as well as
executive producer Patricia Arquette, co-writer Gini Sikes and participating experts such as journalist Gloria Steinem and congresswoman Carolyn Maloney,
I crossed the nation and spoke to hundreds of women. Activists and
housewives, survivors of domestic violence, sex trafficking or rape;
victims of corporate discrimination from vice presidents to minimum wage
workers.

My documentary Equal Means Equal, which was released on
Tuesday, is the fruit of this work. The film is a comprehensive argument
for finally giving American women what everybody thinks they already
have, a basic principle that the United States exports all over the rest
of the world: equal rights for women.

When our constitution was written in 1787,
women had no rights whatsoever. We were chattel – owned first by our
fathers and then our husbands. In fact, the legal model of wives was
used as the basis for the legal model of slaves. In 1920, women achieved
the right to vote.

Absolutely nothing has changed in our
constitution since then to provide women with additional rights. This
fact contradicts the ubiquitous rhetoric of American female
“empowerment” and the general consensus that women today can be/do/have
whatever they want. We can have it all! We can be president! We can
swipe right on Tinder!

First time in 75 years that the Dallas Morning News has recommended a
Democrat for President. Yes folks. Not only is Trump every bit as
terrible as you think, he is even worse than that. Not even Republicans
like the Bush family are supporting him.Dallas Morning News:http://beta.dallasnews.com/opinion/editorials/2016/09/07/recommend-hillary-clinton-us-presidentSeptember 7, 2016There is only one serious candidate on the presidential ballot in November. We recommend Hillary Clinton.

We
don't come to this decision easily. This newspaper has not recommended a
Democrat for the nation's highest office since before World War II — if
you're counting, that's more than 75 years and nearly 20 elections. The
party's over-reliance on government and regulation to remedy the
country's ills is at odds with our belief in private-sector ingenuity
and innovation. Our values are more about individual liberty, free
markets and a strong national defense.

We've been critical of
Clinton's handling of certain issues in the past. But unlike Donald
Trump, Hillary Clinton has experience in actual governance, a record of
service and a willingness to delve into real policy.

In
Clinton's eight years in the U.S. Senate, she displayed reach and
influence in foreign affairs. Though conservatives like to paint her as
nakedly partisan, on Capitol Hill she gained respect from Republicans
for working across the aisle: Two-thirds of her bills had GOP
co-sponsors and included common ground with some of Congress' most
conservative lawmakers.

As President Barack Obama's first
secretary of state, she helped make tough calls on the Middle East and
the complex struggle against radical Islamic terrorism. It's no accident
that hundreds of Republican foreign policy hands back Clinton. She also
has the support of dozens of top advisers from previous Republican
administrations, including Henry Paulson, John Negroponte, Richard
Armitage and Brent Scowcroft. Also on this list is Jim Glassman, the
founding executive director of the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas.

A 1,000-year flood is supposed to be extremely rare. Its chance of occurring in a given year: 0.1 percent.

So
how do we explain that in the span of just five months, the United
States logged no fewer than four deadly 1,000-year floods in states as
widespread as Texas, West Virginia, Maryland and Louisiana – following a
1,000-year-flood that ravaged South Carolina last October.

It
appears that the calculation of a 1,000-year event may no longer be the
most accurate statistic. It was based, as are our increasingly common
100-year natural disaster events, on data from the past.

We may, in
other words, already have shifted so far into a new climate regime that
probabilities have been turned on their head.

Climate change “supercharges” normal weather

Like any climate scientist will tell you, there is more to the story than what you see on the surface.All climate and weather events are influenced to some degree by both natural climate variations and human-made climate change. The amount that each of these influences can exert on a particular event can theoretically range from 0 to 100 percent.

Rigorous
scientific analysis has found that the extreme rainfall that caused a
Texas flooding in May of 2015, for example, was caused by a fairly
typical rainfall pattern associated with that year’s El Niño, a
naturally occurring climate cycle, which had been supercharged by human-made climate change.

Working
in tandem, these two phenomena together produced one of the largest
multi-day flooding events Texas has ever experienced.

Not to mention one of the worst enemies of Womankind

With
her death Monday, Phyllis Schlafly is being hailed as a conservative
icon, leader and activist. But to LGBT people, she’ll be remembered as
one of the worst homophobes of all time.

The Advocate this year named Schlafly among “The 50 Biggest Homophobes of the Last 50 Years.”
Even what conservatives would remember as one her most famous
accomplishments — creating the Stop ERA group that blocked the Equal
Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — was tied up with her
homophobic beliefs. Schlafly argued that the ERA, which was designed to
stop women from being discriminated against, would lead to same-sex
marriage and other rights for gays and lesbians.

The scare tactic
ensured the amendment fell three states short of ratification at the
deadline in 1982.Schlafly spent a lifetime trying to prevent LGBT
people from gaining equality, while spreading an onslaught of
falsehoods — and she did all of it despite having a gay son.

After Republican Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio announced his support for marriage equality — and revealed his son is gay — Schlafly attacked,
saying voters would kick him out of office, even though “They’ll feel
sorry for him, maybe he was pressured by his son to do this.”

Schlafly
certainly never budged on her views about same-sex marriage. After the
Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional a key provision of the Defense of
Marriage Act, saying
the law was clearly motivated by antigay animus, Schlafly was outraged.
She stuck by the idea that supporting “traditional marriage” isn’t
supporting discrimination. But groups such as Right Wing Watch have
extensively catalogued her homophobia while heading up the Eagle Forum,
the conservative organization launched by her Stop ERA campaign.

Ahead of the Supreme Court ruling favorably on marriage equality, she called on governors to ignore the justices, who she said “think they’re God or something.” And after the ruling, she kept right on insisting “we don’t have to obey it just because a few judges said so.”

In her syndicated column, she called on Congress
to pass a resolution that affirmed the “dignity of opposite-sex married
couples,” once again using it to idealize couples where “a
provider-husband is the principal breadwinner and his wife is dedicated
to the job of homemaker.”

Schlafly said the true purpose of same-sex marriage was to "wipe out the Christian religion."

“The
use of same-sex marriage to attack Christian businesses but not
businesses run by members of other religions,” she said, “demonstrates
what is really driving the demand for the new constitutional right to
same-sex marriage.”

It wasn’t the first time she’d suggested gays and lesbians were faking their support for marriage equality.

“I do think that the main goal of the homosexuals is to silence any criticism,” she said in 2013. “Most of them aren’t interested in getting married.”

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson